Thanks. Let me also add, it's a somewhat andro-centric view to assume that women in ancient societies would consider a loss of power and status to be necessarily harmful to their interests. Since we've targeted testosterone as a hormone involved in seeking social status, I'm just putting what looks like two and two together and saying, "looks like four."
In my very limited understanding of women, one of the main things a woman would leave her husband over is being selfish, useless and lazy, and heaven help you if you are unemployed. Therefore, if an overtly patriarchial society would actually be desirable for ancient women if it results in better utility and dependability. I'm not saying here that full independence and equality wouldn't have appealed to women of the time period, but it wouldn't make sense for them to put this before needs THEY might have considered to be far more pressing. Besides, if you actually knew the men of that time period, you wouldn't aspire to emulate them, either.
So what I'm proposing here is a bit of a shift in paradigm. Rather than seeing "matriarchy vs. patriarchy" in terms of a balance of power, consider instead the fact that the shift from matriarchy to patriarchy placed a burden of responsibility on the male. It was no longer enough to just beat your chest and beat up the bad guy, but you had obligations. The home needs repair, and the garden needs tilling. In the patriarchial society, man actually owes something to woman, which is really something of a revolution in favor of women.
If we break out of the andro-centric view that it's all about social dominance and "ruling the roost," it sort of opens our eyes to a lot of extremely successful feminist movements of the past. They were addressing different sets of issues from the modern feminist.
04 Jan 2012, 6:09 pm
